Museum exhibit /Pillow case
A pillow case made by Evgeniia Solomonovna Grosblat (1900-1982) in Tomsk Camp for Family Members of Traitors to the Fatherland in 1938-1939. She made it from some camp-issue overalls, using threads pulled out of underwear. When E.S. Grosblat returned to Moscow in 1954, the pillow case was kept by her family, and after her death in 1982, by the family of her daughter, Irina Adamovna Somova (born 1936). In 2008 I.A. Somova gave the pillow case to the State Museum of the History of the Gulag (Photo: 13.10.2010). 
 
 
 
 
Authenticity
 
Creator of collectionIrina Adamovna Somova (nee Grosblat)
 
Date of acquisition2008
 
Authors and foundersE.S. Grosblat, Author
 
Date and place of creationTomsk Camp for Family Members of Traitors to the Fatherland, (1938-1939)
 
Years and places of existence in subject-related functionMade in the Tomsk Camp for Family Members of Traitors to the Fatherland in 1938–1939; from 1939 to 1942 was used by E. S. Grosblat (or was kept amongst her belongings) in camps near Sverdlovsk and Solikamsk. After her release from the camp on 17.09.1942, Grosblat left with the belongings that she had had in the camps to stay with her daughter, who had been evacuated to Sterlitamak.
 
Size28 х 38 cm
 
Materials
 
MaterialsThreads
 
Description of exhibitA pillow-case made out of several pieces of dark blue rectangular cotton print. On the front there is an insert made like a cross in a geometrical pattern done in coloured threads.
 
State of preservationThe fabric is worn and faded, the threads have come out.
 
Detailed annotationA pillow case made by Evgeniia Solomonovna Grosblat (1900-1982) in Tomsk Camp for Family Members of Traitors to the Fatherland in 1938-1939. Her family believe that she made it from some blue camp-issue overalls or a dressing gown. It is embroidered with coloured threads pulled out of underwear (underpants). From 1939 onwards, E.S. Grosblat was in a camp near Sverdlovsk and then in the Solikamsk Corrective Labour Camp (Bumstroi: the State Trust for Construction and Planning in the Paper Industry). From 1942 onwards, after her release from the camps, E.S. Grosblat lived in Ufa and then in Sterlitamak. From 1943 to 1946 she lived near Kazan’ and then in Strudino, Vladimir oblast'. After 1954, when E.S. Grosblat returned to Moscow, the pillow case was kept in the family. From 1982 onwards, after E. S. Grosblat's death, it was kept in the family of her daughter, Irina Adamovna Somova (born 1926). In 2008, I.A. Somova gave the pillow case to the State Museum of the History of the Gulag as part of a collection dealing with the biography of E.S. Grosblat. (Photo: 13.10.2010).

Needlework was common in the camps. The prisoners swapped different-coloured threads which had been pulled out of other clothing or had been sent to them in parcels by their relatives. Kseniia Dmitrievna Medvedskaia remembers the needlework that was done in the Tomsk Camp for the Families of Traitors in the period from 1937 to 1938: “Threads were taken from discarded knitwear – especially from stockings <...> From time to time we received needles and thread in parcels and we all set about creating what we could and from whatever materials we could find <...> The artists among us put designs directly onto the material and we then spent a lot of time painstakingly sewing and swapping threads with each other, so that we had a wide choice of colours” ("Vsiudu Zhizn'" [“Life is Everywhere"], 1975).
 
PersonsGrosblat (nee Aizenshtat) Evgeniia Solomonovna, creator
 
PersonsMedvedskaia Kseniia Dmitrievna, author of the memoirs
 
PersonsSomova (nee Grosblat) Irina Adamovna, E.S.'s daughter
 
Web page?Yes
 
 
Museum exhibit /Pillow case